Chapter 16 #2
She did not have a word for the look on his face. She had catalogued many of his expressions all these months, and this one was not in it. This was past the library version, the graveyard version and the version he wore when Rose fell asleep against his sleeve. This was something different.
He looked at her for a long moment. Then he looked at the trunk.
He reached out, put both hands on the lid of the trunk and pushed it closed. The latch caught and the trunk sat in the middle of the room, closed, with the specific quality of things that have been returned to a state of non-urgency.
He stood.
He was very still for a moment, looking down at the two of them on the floor; the woman and the child, the child’s face pressed into the woman’s shoulder, the woman looking up at him with the particular expression that was hers and nobody else’s.
He said nothing. There was nothing he could say that would add anything the moment had not already said.
So, he left.
His footsteps went down the corridor, but the sound was different.
She could not have explained the difference; it was in the rhythm of them, perhaps, or the pace, or some quality of intention.
The footsteps of the eleven days had been the footsteps of a man walking away from something. These were different.
Rose made a sound against her shoulder. Not a word, just the soft, exhausted sound of arrival and weariness.
“There,” Cynthia said, quietly. “There. All right.”
“You’re staying,” Rose said.
“Yes.”
A pause. She felt Rose consider this, felt the quality of the consideration, a child’s assessment, checking if this was solid enough to trust. She seemed to find it solid enough.
“Good,” she said.
She fell asleep in the next ten minutes, the deep sleep of exhaustion. Cynthia eased her from her lap to the floor, put a folded blanket from the bed under her head and sat beside her and looked at the closed trunk in the middle of the room.
She was going to unpack it. She was going to do it now, methodically and without drama, and put everything back where it belonged. She was going to take the letter from the schoolroom drawer and do something permanent with it, making the decision unambiguous.
But first she sat for a moment on the floor of her room, beside a sleeping child, with her back against the bed, and she let herself feel the full weight of the past eleven days and the twenty minutes before them and the single word in the middle of all of it.
Stay.
She thought about what it had cost. She had been watching him for months, taking his measure in every circumstance that required it. She knew the price of what he said, and the scale on which he reckoned it.
She looked at the trunk, got up, opened it and began to unpack.
***
Declan sat in his study for a long time.
He had gone there because it was where he went and because he needed somewhere to put what had just happened. It was too large for the corridor, too immediate for the library and entirely too unmanageable for anywhere else.
He sat at the desk. He did not look at the window. He looked at his hands, which were in his lap, and he thought about the weight they had felt when he put them on the lid of the trunk and pushed it closed.
He thought about Rose’s face. The undone, unguarded, utterly unmanaged quality of it. She had looked at him and asked for one word with desperate sincerity; one word was all that stood between her and a loss she could not survive.
He had stood in the corridor outside her bedchamber for longer than he had intended to be there. He had heard it from two rooms away, the sound of Rose, which he always heard, which had always stopped him in corridors and outside doors, and he had gone to the corridor and stood there.
And then he had heard the word us.
He had not moved immediately. He stood there thinking that Rose had applied the word us to the three of them with the calm and factual certainty of someone stating the thing that was true and not asking anyone’s permission.
My niece was on that floor, telling the truth in the way that only children do: without the intermediate steps adults require. She was telling the truth, no matter how much it cost her, and I was standing in the corridor.
He had asked her to stay, and he had meant it in both directions.
He had meant it to Cynthia, and he had meant it to himself: Stay, meaning do not go away again, meaning the distance was wrong, the eleven days were wrong, and the voice that told you it was protecting everyone was the voice that has been wrong before.
He pressed his fingers against his eyes.
He thought about one word. The word he had said.
The word that had cost him the price of eleven days, a hall table, and the particular cold of a house that smelled like nothing.
It was the right word. The only word. Whatever comes after it, and something is going to come after it, something that requires a different kind of courage than anything I have done yet, the word was right.
He got up, lit the fire and returned to the desk.
He pulled a sheet of paper toward him and wrote, at the top of it, in his clear slanted hand: Ashby,
Then he stopped.
He sat for a long time looking at the empty paper, but then he picked up the quill pen again.
He wrote, not to Ashby, but in the private margin of the page where he sometimes worked out the logic of things that needed to be thought through in ink:
She asked what Rose liked. No one has asked me that. No one has…
He stopped and looked at what he had written. He crossed it out, not because it was wrong but because it was a beginning and beginnings deserved better than a margin.
He took a fresh sheet.
He wrote: Ashby.
Then he wrote the letter he had been meaning to write, which was about the investigation, the magistrate and the timeline. It was practical and precise and entirely without the thing he had been sitting with for the past hour.
He sealed it and set it on the desk for the morning post.
He sat in the study for a long time after that, looking at the fire, thinking about what might happen next.
Outside the moors were dark, vast and entirely indifferent to the question.